2.4 Switching to PGNs

Objective: Transition from aged campaign gradually to new campaign without turning off old campaigns suddenly

Steps:

1. Copy well-performing Keywords and Search Terms over to the new PGN (Create a PGN from Existing Keywords or Search Terms)
2. Set your desired parameters (Threshold Builder) –> make sure the PGN is bidding just a bit higher than your aged campaign
3. Give the PGN about 5 days to start showing and aging
4. Day 5 to 10: when the PGN starts showing you can gradually decrease Max. Bid within your old campaign – 10% Max. Bid daily decrease should be fine (Bulk Edit Rules | Selective Threshold Update)
5. After Day 10 reassess: at this stage PGN is alive and bringing most of impressions/click
6. Day 10 to 21 you want to switch campaign spend from the old to the new PGN.
   You gradually do this so there is no shock to the system, and you allow Amazon time to associate your SKU with the new set of keywords and build relevancy to your new PGN.
   You can keep doing this at 10% Max. Bid daily decrease
7. After Day 21 – review and if everything looks fine then pause the old campaign

Video Transcription:

Hello, and welcome to another video of the Zon Tools Tips and Tricks Tutorial Series.

In this video I’m going to cover how we advice you to handle the transition from your old set-up, your old campaigns, to a more automated set-up that we offer, that is the PGN.

As you probably know, Amazon builds history between your SKUs and the Keywords. So, if you were to run both your old campaigns and a PGN set-up at the same time, Amazon will keep giving the history of your old campaign more weight, and keep sending to your old campaigns and old set-up, most of the impressions and traffic.

You might want that, but ultimately, if you decided to move to our most structured and automated set-up which is the PGN, that’s not what you want because you want Amazon to switch off the traffic to your old campaign, so that we can automate it better than you just manually managing your old campaigns.

To do so without shocking the Amazon system and without the risk of incurring a loss of sales, ranking, and ultimately the profit, the transition from your old set-up to the new PGN set-up should be done gradually, at least for your best-performing products.

For products and/or campaigns which are not performing well, you should just freeze your current set-up and set up your PGN straightaway. For your bestselling produts, I would advise you to tread carefully and if possible, follow this process.

It’s a very simple step-by-step process although it takes about a month. Our objective is to make a gradual transition to our new PGN campaigns without suddenly turning off your campaigns, while allowing Amazon sufficient time to build a new history, connection, and indexing between your SKU and new keywords within your new PGN campaigns.

The first step will be to copy all the well-performing Keywords from the old campaign to a new PGN, and create a new PGN.

Step 2 is using the parameters that we request. If you click here where you see ‘click here’, you’ll find the video where I showed you how to use our Threshold Builder, and how to pick the keywords for the new PGN.

I forgot to mention at the beginning of this strategy which I’m discussing right now in this video, can be found here: www.zon.tools/switching-to-pgn. You’ll find the link to this in the YouTube video so just check the description below.

The first is to get all your keywords out of your previous set-up and campaign. The second is to use those keywords to set up a new PGN using proper thresholds.

After the first step we wait for five days. Make sure that whatever the thresholds are, you’re bidding a little bit higher than your old set-up and you have a little bit higher budget. This is going to be a signal for Amazon to start considering your new PGN.

Thereafter we’re going to wait for about five days to give some time for your new PGN to age. In these five days you may or may not get impressions and clicks, most likely not, because you’re competing against the heavy history of your previous set-up. But this is to notify Amazon that something is going on, so as to start making a connection between your SKU, PGN, and your new keywords.

In about five days to a week you should start seeing impressions and clicks gradually. At that point what you want to do is to throttle down your previous campaign. You’d also want to, over the next period of five days, decrease 5% a day, the overall bids of the keywords within your old set-up as well as the budget of your old set-up.

After those five days, reassess and see what happens. Is your PGN gaining? Is your new PGN getting attractions, more clicks and impressions? Is the old set-up losing clicks or impressions, and is this working out well? Overall, are you losing sales for your product? Is it (sales) already being affected?

If all the answers to these are positive and you’re happy about what is happening, you’re going to spend the next two to three weeks progressively decreasing the budget and the bids of your old campaign. This will eventually drive your budget and bids very close to zero over time, while allowing Amazon time to get used to your new SKU campaign, PGN set-up, and move all the sales, impressions, and clicks to the new PGN.

By the third week your bids and impressions should be very close to zero for your old set-up and your new PGN should do most of the heavy lifting – it should have taken all the other lifting that your previous campaign used to do. If that’s the case at this point, you can simply finally pause or archive your old campaign and just keep running the PGNs.

That’s it for now. Thank you for watching this video. There are resources in the comments of the video. See you in the next one. Thanks again for watching!